MAKES ME SICK!

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 05, Issue 67, 19 June 1942, Page 5

MAKES ME SICK!

DOROTHY THOMPSON S PLAIN TALK AMERICAN CRITICISM OF BRITAIN THE FALL OF SINGAPORE The following article as refreshing as it is candid comes from the pen of the famous American commentator, Dorothy Thompson, and appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of February 18 last. For plain straight talk it stands alone and will be read Avith zest by our readers in Whakatane. All right. . All right . . .Yes, I read Cecil Brown, and so did Goebbels. He's quoting him all over the place. Yes, I know the show in Singapore Avas not so good. Yes, I knoAV about the complacency . . . Yes, I know they didn't follow a scorchedearth policy. Yes—you can't feel AA r orse about it than I did. I knoAV what it means. Maybe I knoAV what it meant better than do—the fall of Singapore. Just the same I can't stand the cackling. Who's calling Avhom names? Is this war in the> Far East the fault of the British? We talked a j r ear and a half—Ham Fish with a German agent in his office, the America First Committee riddled with Nazi agents—about whether this was our Avar. The British supported us in the Far East,, not Ave the British. Do you remember Fearl Harbour? Were Ave so hot at Pearl Har-

hour? Listen, brothers: This is a war against Japan and Nazi Germany. Get this straight: The British are our allies. I read all the interviews with the American citizens who came from Penang. The British didn't evacuate the Americans properly. The British didn't have anti-aircraft guns. The British didn't this and the British didn't that. The British didn't have to have a war with Japan and they didn't have to have ,a war with Hitler. Do you know that? They could have tossed the continent to the winds and made a deal with both' our enemies—• against us. A military deal, a financial deal, a trade defil. All they had to do was go Nazi. All they had to do was agree about spheres of influence in tlie Western Hemisphere and the East. Hitler's still moaning that they didn't do it. Did you ever look at the map? There arc 20-odd million Anglo-Sax-on members of the English speaking world outside the United States and they are scattered from Land's End to Hell and Gone. Not quit© two years ago they had the Germans at the Channel and there weren't any anti-aircraft guns in Britain, either.

Forty-seven million people* on a little island and they could starve in a fortnight. Antl for a year and a half they held the world at bay alone. That doesn't make any impression on 3 T ou? Fifty thousand of Hiem died—right in England. I can t remember that anj'bodv whimpered . • hen the King of Belgium made a separate peace, Paul Reynaud cried- "Treason." Churchill said: "Wc reserve judgment." Listen to the Vichyites in New York. "Britain let us down." Not one mumbling word from Britain about the Franco that handed over everything to Hitler. Not a word. Only fait!) in France—when even France didn't have any. You'd think to listen to some of you that you want Britain to lose. Careful, careful, be quiet and pray. You don't think much of the British Empire? No? Well, brother, if Britain goes, write finis over western civilisation. Or do you think perhaps that America can carry it alone? Have you heard the British say a word against the Americans? Did they crow over Pearl Harbour? Did they rush, into print or talk of our smugness and complacency? Did you ever have an Englishman or an English woman for a friend? Did that friend ever let you down? In the hour of her greatest distress. her greatest disaster, I an American, write these lines to Eng-. land. * And I say to England: In spite of Singapore I sing with you: "Land, of hope and glory, mother of the free." And I. sing with you: "There'll always be an England, and England will be free." And I ask you to sing with me the great songs of America: "Sweet land of liberty,'" and "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean." and "Mine eyes have seen the Songs written in the world's greatest language—the language of resistance.